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Musings on the family village

I’ve been thinking about how technology mediates us and our communication; on the condition of modern life with regard to this mediation; on the (fictional?) alternative of a pre-digital village.

The family village is a place where everyone knows one another. It’s not too big. It’s unhurried.

People work hard. But they’re not distracted. They don’t have ever-growing task lists. They don’t ever worry about “scheduling” – they know what they have to do, and what they want to do, and they know there’s a time and a place for all these things.

Things go more slowly. Is it less efficient than modern life? Maybe. But maybe – since there’s less to do – more things get done. People don’t know what the phrase “drop the ball” means. They feel overwhelmed when someone in the family has poor health, or they can’t put enough food on the table – but never because “their day was crazy.”

They socialize a lot. They do so over meals. They do so as the walk to and fro on the paths in the village*. They share a lot.

There’s not a lot of privacy, though people have spots where they steal away to get away from the rest of the village when they need to.

They don’t understand the concept of a nuclear family. Children are raised by all the adults. Grandparents don’t miss their grandkids, since they live in the same house, or down the street.

They don’t have that much of what we would call choice – they mostly do what their parents did, they mostly stay where they’re from, they mostly eat what’s cooked, they mostly listen to music that happens to playing**.

They talk mostly in-person. They love to get interrupted – by people.

They would hate:

Twitter. What is all this stuff? Does it ever end? Are these people saying these things? Who are these people?

Email. Stop giving me stuff to do. I don’t like lists, but if I have to use one, I’ll write it myself. And if you want to talk, just come over sometime.

Computers as they are today. There’s too much stuff in there!

Commuting. I might go far away for work, but I go for months, then come home. I don’t go back and forth an hour each day. If I really have to, I walk or bike, usually with someone. I don’t understand traffic.

A family village is:

slow

calm

personal

undistracted

warm

Family villages are based in reality, but they’re also a fantasy; a fantasy of a time that maybe never was. They seem to be wrapped up in the past, in nostalgia.

Are the future trend lines of technology and culture destined to extinguish this (mythical) past? Or will the trend line change, and move culture to a calmer place?

I’m not sure that the increasing ubiquity and speed of computation necessitates an ever more distracted, faster, competitive, harried, cluttered existence. It has led that way so far. The values of choice and instantaneity and individualization seem to lead to this distracted world.

We are dealing with that distraction by avoiding synchronous communication in favor of asynchronous, short messages: but those messages don’t really solve the distraction issue, and they certainly don’t capture the magic of a casual family village chat.

Calming ourselves may be more about removing than it is about adding or augmenting. However, it’s not easy for companies to profit through depriving their customers of a service or product. A lockbox for your phone probably won’t see widespread adoption. Replacements work better – Whole Foods replaces McDonalds. Board games replace single player video games.

We’re still at the early edge of sensors, wireless and mobile computing. I believe thoughtful design and the hardware revolution hold the promise of capturing some of the magic of the family village.